DISHONOUR TYRANT IDOLS, 2025
Sylvia eckermann / Gerald Nestler

ICONOCLASTIC ACTS: DISHONOUR TYRANT IDOLS

Autocrats are on the rise. For decades, reactionary forces with considerable financial and strategic resources have been distorting reality, particularly about social policy, immigration, and climate change, thereby driving social division. To gain influence and power, they distort facts, twist the truth, bend the law, and manipulate elections. In alliance with technocapitalists, they are now weaponizing AI against democracy and human rights.

Art brings imagination to life. In times of conflict, it can create counter-images to violence and abuse of power. Today, however, we need more than a new visual language. Criticism and dissent are not enough, we need a different strategy of deconstruction against authoritarian imagination and its coercive rearrangement of desires.

What we therefore call for are iconoclastic acts against their false image of the world. We need insurrections that expose and betray those who misappropriate power and control. We must abandon loyalty and compliancy and turn digital renegade to demonstrate and resolve their abusive power over the imagination.

Each of the four discursive performances of HOTHOUSE. The Future of Demonstration. Season 5 ended with ICONOCLASTIC ACTS: DISHONOUR TYRANT IDOLS, a tribunalistic ritual in which we smashed some of those who threaten fundamental rights and livelihoods – with the symbolic means of art, for now.

We popped the air out of those whose false images excert enormous destructive forces. In this iconoclastic act, their sculptural bodies twisted and contracted into a deeper truth. For the new portraits we created manifest the dark side of the contemporary tyrant idol. This aesthetic insurrection is an act of creation, not an act of aggression. It is artistic self-defence against the false consciousness of supremacy that only leads to violence and destruction.